“I can’t!” she breathed, but she did not withdraw her hand from his clasp. She could not! It was as if those two palms had welded together, and had become parts of one and the same organism.
There was an instant of silence, in which she slowly gathered her swirling senses, and in which he sat, shocked, stunned, disbelieving his own ears. Why, he had known, as positively, and more positively, than if she had told him, that there was a perfect response in her to the great desire which throbbed within him. It had come to him from her like the wavering of soft music, music which had blended with his own pulsing diapason in a melody so subtle that it drowned the senses to languorous swooning; it had come to him with the delicate far-off pervasiveness of the birth of a new star in the heavens; it had come to him as a fragrance, as a radiance, as the beautiful tints of spring blossoms, as something infinitely stronger, and deeper, and sweeter, than the sleep of death. That tremendous and perfect fitness and accord with him he felt in her hand even now.
“I can’t, Tod,” she said again, and neither one noticed that she had unconsciously used the name she had heard from his mother, and which she had unconsciously linked with her thoughts of him. “There could never be a unity of purpose in us,” and now, for the first time, she gently withdrew her hand. “I could never be in sympathy with your work, nor you with my views. Have you noticed that we have never held a serious dispute over any topic but one?”
He drew a chair before her, and took her hand again, but this time he patted it between his own as if it were a child’s.
“Gail, dear, that is an obstacle which will melt away. There was a time when I felt as you do. The time will come when you, too, will change.”
“You don’t understand,” she gently told him. “I believe in God the Creator; the Maker of my conscience; my Friend and my Father. I am in no doubt, no quandary, no struggle between faith and disbelief. I see my way clearly, and there are no thorns to cut for me. I shall never change.”
He looked at her searchingly for a moment, and then his face grew grave; but there was no coldness in it, nor any alteration in the blueness of his eyes.
“I shall pray for you,” he said, with simple faith.
CHAPTER XXI
THE PUBLIC IS AROUSED
Clad in her filmy cream lace gown, Gail walked slowly into her boudoir, and closed the door, and sank upon her divan. She did not stop to-night to let down her hair and change to her dainty negligee, nor to punctiliously straighten the room, nor to turn on the beautiful green light; instead, with all the electric bulbs blazing, she sat with her chin in her hand, and, with her body perfectly in repose, tried to study the whirl of her mind.